We Are Sailing

There was precious little to do in Abu Dhabi in the 1970s (there were precious few people there), but they did have a small sailing club, which had a modest fleet of 420 dinghies.

A 420 Dinghy with Kite I joined the club and sailed with experienced friends most Fridays. We even traveled to Qatar for a regatta. The thing we lacked most for racing in Abu Dhabi was the breeze, any breeze, so we mostly had drifting matches. The consolation was that we made sure to have enough beer on board.

During the Abu Dhabi years, and on some subsequent occasions, my pal, Rob Cornish, had three small yachts in Turkey which he was always trying to get people to charter to help with the costs.

So for a number of years, our family joined his, and others, to sail together as a small fleet. The first time I went I had no idea how to sail the boat, so Rob’s daughter, Helen, came on board to show me the ropes. I gradually managed to “sort of” sail the yacht, and over a few years became somewhat adequate. But the holidays in Turkey with Rob became an annual fun-filled family outing. Our kids had others of their own age to frolic with, and interesting Turkish sights to explore. Many of the places and escapades from those sailing holidays long ago remain imprinted on my memory.

The memory must have been strong, because years later, as I started to think of life after work, I thought it would be a good idea to test out whether sailing was really for me. And so, in 2005 or 2006 I found an outfit operating on Long Island Sound which had a time-share programme with 36-foot yachts. I think each boat had three subscribers, and everyone nominated dates and times to use the boat. This trial worked really well, and for two seasons we learned to helm and navigate the boat all over Long Island Sound. This gave me the confidence to make the leap, and buy a new boat.

I was interested in a mid-50-ft boat and initially focused on Oyster. Somehow my interest turned to Discovery and their 56 foot model. I contacted them, went to England to see them, and placed an order for a new build to be delivered in 2008. This was followed by a number of trips to England to do various sailing-related courses such as: marine radio, first aid at sea, and celestial navigation. At the same time, on a series of weekends, I followed a course of sailing instruction in New York harbour leading to the RYA qualification of Coastal Skipper. The test for this had to be conducted in the British Virgin Islands under the supervision of an former Royal Navy submarine commander. I just scraped through. Of note though is that Pierce and I were sailing in New York harbour, backwards and forwards between New Jersey and Manhattan two days before the attack on the Twin Towers.

The Discovery 56 was delivered to Newport, RI in the early summer of 2008, on the deck of a freighter. Charlie Marts, my newly recruited skipper, helped me with the commissioning in Narragansett Bay. Next we sailed to Maine for a shakedown cruise. It was an adventure, not least when Charlie ran the mast into the center span of a bridge. I had to go back to work, so I left Charlie to bring the boat to Stamford, a marina near where I lived, for repairs. As it turned out, this was the least of my worries. The state of Connecticut tried to charge me luxury tax on the full price of the boat. It took ages, and a good lawyer, to negotiate this down to a modest sum. But it was time to get out of Connecticut.

We decided to move Sapphire to Miami, so off she went in October 2008, experiencing 40 knots in a storm around Cape Hatteras. The rest of the ride was exhilarating, in winds around 20 kts with the boat exceeding 10 kts at times.

Miami was a great base, with the Bahamas in easy reach. Aisling and friends came for a jaunt in March, 2009, as did Miriam, Kevin, and Catriona later on. I also got a chance to cruise the Bahamas islands. We enjoyed our frequent weekend visits to Miami Beach with its Art Deco buildings, its wide variety of restaurants, not to mention the variety of the humans!

Having grown comfortable with Sapphire over the better part of a year, I reckoned it was time to take retirement (at age 63). I had been with Hess for 7 ½ years, the business was in good shape and I felt I was ready to escape the daily grind.

Furthermore, I had decided to someday sail my boat across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and wanted to be fit enough to do it. Looking back, crossing the Atlantic seemed like a foolhardy decision, especially when Charlie let me know that he had never sailed offshore! However, we moved quickly after I finished work on March 31, 2009. The boat was loaded with foodstuffs for the passage, Charlie recruited a pal to get us to Bermuda, and on 6 May we set off. Charlie’s dad and Colm O’Connor joined the crew in Bermuda and we then had a somewhat eventful, sometimes stormy, passage to the Azores, followed by an easier trip to Lagos, Portugal. We had made it across the Atlantic.

After cruising the Mediterranean in summer 2009 and 2010, particularly enjoying the French Côte d’Azur and the full coastal length of Italy, I decided I wanted to move up to a bigger yacht.

As it happened, Discovery had decided to build a 67-foot model, and so I signed up for one of the first builds. I did this with a view to adventuring across the Pacific. We sailed Sapphire to Lymington in the UK in October 2010 and she sold fairly quickly.

The next momentous event was the arrival of Pierce and Amy’s son Nolan in February 2011. He was a beautiful redhead with a lovely happy temperament and he has grown into a talented young man who makes grandad very proud.

Nolan has the genealogical distinction of being (so far) the sole male O’Connor amongst nine grandchildren of my siblings and me! How unique is that?

Sapphire II, as the new boat was named, was delivered in Southampton in August 2011.

We had a nice launch party on board, attended by the siblings and then it was time to head to the Caribbean.

Kevin came with us for the Atlantic crossing to St. Lucia in the Caribbean.

Then it was time to prepare the boat for the adventure of a lifetime, the crossing of the Pacific. We were going to do this as part of an organized group of 26 yachts in the World ARC. ARC stands for Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. We were delighted when Gavin came on board as crew for the voyage.

leading the ARC pack out of St. Lucia Miriam joined in the San Blas Islands of Panama and sailed as far as Tahiti, and Charlie Marts did the leg from St. Lucia to the San Blas. To cross the Pacific, we followed the so-called Coconut Route via the Panama Canal, to the Galápagos Islands, the Marquesas, Tahiti, on to Fiji. We made many friends in the sailing community, including Hervé and Margaret Poron, had all sorts of adventures and enjoyed spectacular scenery. It was truly the cruise of a lifetime! We had left Saint Lucia in January 2012 and arrived in Suva, Fiji, in late June.

We decided not to continue with the rally to Australia but instead to head to New Zealand. Three other yachts decided to do the same thing as a way to see that country and to stay protected from the impending tropical cyclones. Kevin joined us in Fiji for the passage south with the intention of meeting his daughter Niamh and her husband, in New Zealand. The passage from New Caledonia to New Zealand meant entering the higher latitudes and gave us the toughest sail we encountered for the whole trip.

In fact the other three boats ran for shelter to Norfolk Island and waited out the storm that we slogged through.

We did the tourist trips in New Zealand and then headed home to New York for a break. And a break I got when I broke my hip while skiing in the Rockies. I couldn’t go back to the yacht which had been left in New Zealand while I was recovering, so we arranged for Sapphire II to be shipped to Gibraltar. Kevin helped me move the boat to the Greek island of Corfu via Malta. Dermot came on board for a great cruise of the Greek islands and Turkey.

Kevin and his daughter Fiona joined in August for the passage to Mykonos, and then in October, Aisling and friends joined to cruise the Turkish coast.

In late October 2013 I left the boat and flew home, and Paolo Ranalli, who had replaced Charlie as skipper on Sapphire I in 2009, delivered the yacht to Trieste, northeast Italy, for the winter.

Summer 2014 saw us cruise both sides of the Adriatic, alternating between Croatia and Italy. This again was a very memorable experience. We had guests come and go, including Kevin and Patricia Brady, Simon and Janet Budd (my co-owners of the Abu Dhabi ski boat), Dermot, Kevin, and Gavin. There is no doubt that the Croatian Islands provide some of the best cruising grounds in the world. We left the area reluctantly, but it was September, and we wanted to get to La Rochelle before the autumn storms in the Bay of Biscay began.

Earlier in the year I had read an article in a sailing magazine about a French yard using a novel boatbuilding method which delivered high quality yachts at a reasonable price. So I had ordered a CNB 76, to be delivered in Bordeaux in 2015, and that meant getting Sapphire II to the yacht brokers in Lymington to be sold. We spent about a week in La Rochelle unloading and storing Sapphire’s contents, then said farewell to Paolo, who sailed the boat to the UK.

was built in Bordeaux, and we enjoyed visiting the yard during the construction. Not only was Bordeaux a beautiful city, but it is the center of a vast wine-growing region. We spent a memorable long weekend in the village of St. Émilion, slap bang in the heart of some of France’s most famous vineyards. We took delivery of our beautiful new yacht in July 2015.

By good fortune, my siblings were in La Rochelle during the handover, so we had quite a celebration for the launch of the new boat.

The inaugural cruise took us along the coast of Brittany before we jumped over to Ireland, docking in the center of Cork city. We even managed to circumnavigate the famous Fastnet rock!

Next, Sapphire crossed the Atlantic to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

This turned out to be a great cruising area. Family and friends came to sail with us and Pierce sampled a large variety of rums when we visited a distillery on St. Croix. Then we sailed to the Dominican Republic where we picked up Herve and Margaret Poron, and went to Cuba, stopping very briefly at Haiti on the way. Cuba was eye-opening and the people were charming. Its destitution is such a shame.

As it happened, we were in Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic in March 2016 and so that was where I celebrated my 70th birthday, in the company of family and friends.

We had an obligation to CNB to promote the brand in both New York and Newport, so north we went, hiring Mike Teuteberg, whom we knew from the Pacific crossing, as the new skipper. It was fun being in New York harbour, a short commute from home!

There followed three seasons alternating between Antigua in the winter, and the U.S. northeast in the summer. In Antigua we were persuaded to take part in a variety of regattas, which, while this required recruiting crew from wherever, turned out to be great fun.

Maine in the summer was another matter. I still remember Aoife diving into the freezing water and jumping out even quicker! We had family cruises around Nantucket and out of Boston harbour to Provincetown.

I had been talking to Hervé, who was taking his yacht from the Caribbean to Europe and planned to do a Baltic cruise. That sounded like a good plan to me, so George Cox, who had replaced Mike, sailed Sapphire back across the Atlantic to Falmouth, UK.

The cruise around the Baltic was very pleasant, and of course, the passage across the North Sea and through the Kiel Canal brought new experiences. All went without a hitch until near the end, when, sailing along the coast of Sweden on August 15, 2019, without warning, the rig came crashing down scaring the wits out of the crew (me, Patricia, Miriam, and Kevin).

It appeared that a fitting connecting the rigging to the mast had failed due to metal fatigue. Luckily it didn’t happen in the middle of one of our Atlantic crossings. We motored to Copenhagen and flew home from there. George gathered some friends and took the boat to Falmouth without further incident, the base we chose for the repairs.

The repairs took longer than expected, because work in 2020 suffered delays due to the COVID restrictions. Nonetheless, by summer 2020 the yacht was repaired and we enjoyed a gentle cruise down the coast of Europe where all the marinas and shoreside restaurants were delighted to see us as no one else was sailing!

There followed six summer seasons, typically from May through September, cruising the Med from west to east and north to south. The Mediterranean, its coastline and its islands always delighted. The small coastal towns, the local restaurants, the historical buildings and the beaches all conspired, together with the company of family and friends, to delight the senses and to provide lasting pleasurable memories.

In June 2025, we celebrated a notable sail in the company of all the family. We were ten and we also had two skippers and a stewardess.

We chartered a catamaran, and Sapphire and the Cat explored the west coast of Corsica down to the northern tip of Sardinia. It was a great success and was much enjoyed by adults and kids alike. Both yachts were fully provisioned with food and drink so we anchored off quiet sandy beaches most nights. Days were spent swimming, paddleboarding and exploring the often rocky headlands.

During the summer of 2025, I had reluctantly decided to offer the boat for sale. She was ten years old and likely to require increasing maintenance…as would I! I sort of hoped that no one would express interest, but I was wrong. We got an acceptable offer. The new owner wanted to take the boat at the end of November 2025, so earlier in the month, we paid a last visit to Sapphire in St. Tropez, her berth.

We went for a final sail in brisk, late November conditions, and then, with tears in our eyes, said goodbye to Sapphire, our summer home for ten years.